Hai & Topsy: Spatlese—Folklore; Bellman; Brecht; Jiddisch

Henry and Gunnel Frankl are a German/Swedish husband-and-wife team of harmonizing, guitar-strumming, song-collecting folksingers. This multilingual collection offers two discs of Swedish and world folk songs, a disc devoted to the songs of Werner Helwig (with some lyrics by Bertolt Brecht), and a disc of Jewish songs. Henry escaped to Sweden as a youth during the Nazi era (his parents were probably killed at Lodz), and as a collector and editor of Yiddish music he and Gunnel have done much to preserve the vanished world of Eastern European Jews. The German-language booklets either annotate the songs or reproduce their lyrics. Selections include "Little Boxes," "Elvira Madigan," "Hush, Little Baby," "Rallarvisa," "De los Cuatro Muleros," "La Cumbiambiam," "Azizam," "Eileen Aroon," "Linstead Market," and "Minguelay Boat Song." This collection sums up a life well spent bridging cultures with song.